This is an open plea to WebKit to please discontinue the use of webkit-fake-url when an image is pasted into a contenteditable element and instead use dataURI encoding like any sensible person would. Or at the very least enable JavaScript access to the underlying image data. It makes absolutely no sense to block pasted image data from JavaScript when the user has explicitly pasted it into a web page.

Consider this question: what benefit is there in being able to paste an image into a web page that can only be viewed by the person who pasted it?

Can you tell I’m frustrated? I want Clipica to support Safari, but this is the only thing preventing it.

I just released a new web app called Clipica! It lets you upload images to ImageShack just by pasting them into the browser window! You get a tiny url as the result that you can use however you like: comments, forums, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc! It currently only works in Chrome, as only Chrome supports pasting images, but hopefully other browsers will adopt this functionality soon!

In fact, since this is a blog post it seems fitting that I demonstrate its usefulness right here! So let’s do that. Ready?

I believe in intellectual property. I believe in copyright. I believe the creator of a work has implicit rights granted by the law, and that no license agreement can change what is written in law. Therefore, the only thing a license agreement can legally do is grant me additional freedoms that are not provided implicitly by the law.

So long as I don’t break the law, or attempt to do anything with the software that would otherwise violate those implicit rights and freedoms, then there’s nothing the license agreement can make me agree to that isn’t already covered.

Let me make one thing clear: I am not a lawyer. I have never studied law. Yet I still believe in law. I believe order must be maintained by the people for the people. How nice would it be if we each got to decide which laws to abide by and which to ignore?¹

¹ In fact, it wouldn’t be nice at all: it would be anarchy. I hope that was obvious enough.

I also believe in democracy–not because it’s inherently the answer, but because it’s worked so far. The election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States has only served to strengthen my belief that democracy is still alive. But as soon as 50% of the voting population becomes either corrupt or ignorant, democracy falls apart. It is therefore not only our right, but our duty as citizens and humanitarians to have educated opinions and beliefs. It is our duty to care.

Since I don’t believe that using a piece of software made publically available is against the law, and since in many cases checking a box that says “I have read and agree to the terms of this license” is the only obvious way for that software to become usable, I also believe that I am in fact being forced to check that box regardless of whether or not I agree with what the license agreement states, and therefore in doing so, the law provides that I am not agreeing to its artificial (and unfounded) terms, making all such end-user license agreements void and pointless.

Now the use of someone else’s work is another story. This is not a freedom granted implicitly by the law, and therefore licenses are required for things like open source software–not because they are imposing restrictions, but because they are liberating existing ones. This is fully within the creator of a work’s right to do, and I know for a fact I, and many others, appreciate this.

Ok so I lied: there are times you do need to read a softare license. But unless I intend to bundle that person’s software with my own (which is not a freedom granted implicitly), or do anything else besides simply use the software I paid for or otherwise obtained by legal means, then I see no reason why I should be forced to read an agreement that only tells me what I already know, let alone agree to it.

So that is why I never read software license agreements.

Logan Murray is a software developer, not a lawyer. This article is a piece of opinion. Feel free to argue it. Please don’t take it as legal advice or legal fact.

Go to orangenote.littlesoftware.ca and get free text clipping software for your PC. OrangeNote allows you to store text clippings (either entered manually or copied directly from text in another program) in a full-text index and find them by means of typing just a few letters.

OrangeNote™ 1.0

OrangeNote Standard Edition is completely free for personal use and includes an array of handy features above and beyond what you might expect. Some examples: you can click a tag to instantly search for and display all sibling notes tagged with it; holding down modifier keys while the console (the system tray menu) is open will show any notes bound to those modifiers; typing a hotkey while the console is open will instantly open the note bound to that hotkey, and so forth. There are lots of nifty features to explore and discover.

If you ever find yourself typing something out again and again (who doesn’t?), OrangeNote can simplify your life and save you time by allowing you to type arbitrarily long (pages, if you want) text clippings into any program with a single keystroke of your choosing. You can choose any combination of the Control, Shift, Alt and Windows modifiers (or none) and any key thanks to a handy “keystroke recorder”—just click the “Add a hotkey” link at the top of your note and type the hotkey you want to assign the note.

The Professional Edition of OrangeNote is still in the works, but if you upgrade now for $15 you can synchronize your notes across multiple computers running OrangeNote, and upgrades are lifetime unlimited licenses, meaning you only pay once and can install the current and all future versions of OrangeNote Pro on as many computers as you like in your name. You can even upgrade for free thanks to a new service called TrialPay!

So please try it out, and most of all, please help spread the word! Remember, little companies have little advertising budgets! 😉

I’m delighted to announce that WordPress.com now (finally) supports custom blog favicons! This is an important step forward in what was previously a little blue circle-dominated world. Back when piHole started, I was using a custom installation of WordPress on my 1&1 Linux server, which allowed me to use my own favicon simply by placing a favicon.ico file at the root of my server, and tweaking a couple files. So I whipped up a little 4-bit blocky drawing of a pi symbol and a hole (fitting, no?) just for fun. Turns out I fell in love with its ironic simplicity and it came to be (in my mind at least) the perfect 16 by 16 pixel representation of my blog, and vicariously, myself.

Then came the day when piHole shut down because I had to move to ASP.NET to take advantage of my .NET skills on the web side of things, and sadly, WordPress was PHP. And so it remained for quite a while and I was without an informal outlet for my thoughts and ramblings.

Then one day while I was developing the early interface of OrangeNote I was just so thrilled at how things were turning out that I just had to tell the world, and so piHole was reborn. I decided to give the hosted service a try, even though I knew it had a few limitations. I’ll admit I first checked out Blogger, since I’d already had experience with WordPress (not that it wasn’t a good experience), but frustratingly, someone had already registered a “pihole” blog with Blogger! (Like, as if!) So I meandered back to WordPress and set up my very first WordPress.com blog, pihole.

I was delighted to discover that I could even reinstate the old pihole.org domain that I had lying around somewhere, which I promptly did, but was dismayed to learn that WordPress.com had no support for custom favicons whatsoever, and my little 4-bit drawing would have to stay buried in a directory somewhere, hidden from the world…

My dad made the cover of Canadian Railway Modeller this month! His layout, a fictional Canadian National Railways division based in the 80s, fills most of the downstairs of our house in Napanee, Ontario.

In addition to the cover, the issue also features an article written by my dad, which includes six more photos from his layout.

Needless to say I’m extremely proud. I know how much care and devotion my dad puts into this hobby of hobbies and the recognition is well-deserved. Great work, dad!!

Based on some user feedback, I’ve given the note window in OrangeNote a bit of a makeover. Margins have been slimmed down and the text area is now clearly defined, separating areas cleanly and making things feel more in place. I’ve also added a “pin” function (not shown) that allows a floating note window to be temporarily turned into a normal window complete with a task bar button.

Check out the evolution:

Before

After

OrangeNote is currently available for beta testing at Wakoopa. Take it for a test drive and get a free registration!